The Kipp Line
The earliest provable date in this family's record is January 14, 1810 — the birth of James Kipp (recorded in surviving documents as Knipp) in Fentress County, Tennessee.1 From that name, the Kipp line moves through four generations and three states to arrive in Wayne County, Indiana, in 1923, when Tina Agnes Kipp married Fritz Hoffmann and the surname passed out of the male line.2
The spelling. The records the family kept — the family Bible, the typed binder a descendant compiled in the late twentieth century — record this surname as both Knip (older spelling, found in the Bible) and Knipp (the modern records, including the GEDCOM). Family voice in the late twentieth century preferred Kipp, and that is the convention used in the prose here. Citations preserve the original spelling exactly as the source recorded it.3
Generation 1. James Kipp, born January 14, 1810, place recorded as Fentress County, Tennessee.1 He married Nancy Jane Glayebrooks, born April 18, 1818 in Virginia.4 The binder records the marriage date as January 28, 1836. They raised five sons in Tennessee. James Kipp moved the family from Tennessee to Metcalfe County, Kentucky in 1857. He died in 1875.5
Generation 2. Of the five sons, the third — Alvin Kalo Kipp — carries the line forward. Born March 8, 1841, in Tennessee.6 He married Marie Jane Clark on January 27, 1863, per the binder; the GEDCOM names his wife but the marriage date is recorded in the binder rather than the export.7 Alvin Kalo died on October 23, 1905, in Metcalfe County, Kentucky.8 The 70-page family binder is dedicated to him by its title: "Descendants of Alvin Kalo Knipp."9
Generation 3. Eugene Alonso Kipp, born 1864 in Kentucky, was Alvin Kalo's eldest son.10 He married Martha Ellen Nance, born January 7, 1866, in Kentucky.11 (The binder, working from family memory, recorded her surname as "Nancy" — taking it for a middle name — but the GEDCOM and downstream records confirm Nance as the actual surname. This is exactly the kind of disagreement between the two sources that the citation system is meant to surface rather than smooth over.) Eugene Alonso died on April 20, 1950, in Connersville, Fayette County, Indiana.12 Martha Ellen died on March 15, 1934, in Brownsville, Union County, Indiana.13
Generation 4. Tina Agnes Kipp, born August 16, 1893, in Boone County, Indiana.14 (Boone County's main town is Zionsville, which is the place name the binder uses; the two are consistent.) On February 24, 1923, she married William Wilmar "Fritz" Hoffmann of Muncie, Indiana, six years her junior.15 They settled in Wayne County and raised four children. Tina Agnes died on February 25, 1968, in Centerville, Wayne County, Indiana.16
The surname passes. Tina and Fritz's son Jackie Darrel Hoffmann — born June 26, 1926, Milton, Wayne County — was the father of Jennifer Hoffmann, who married Jack Thompson; through her, the Kipp blood arrives in Benjamin Andrew Thompson, born 1978.17 After Tina, the Kipp surname does not pass forward in this descent line. It is preserved in the records, in the binder, and on this page.
Artifacts
Photos, scans, and documents that back this chapter. Each carries a SHA256 fingerprint so the file can be independently verified as unchanged since upload, and a short code — the tiny adjective-noun pair below each card — for compact reference (e.g. lineage.sent.li/a/sage-pine).